You & Me

Instant friendship, just add water.

When the story starts off, Luke is drowning in feelings of failure and insecurity. He meets Landon who promptly throws him a lifeline. And the two are fast friends. Like super fast. If romance moved this fast, I'd be complaining, but it was simply lovely to read about Luke falling more and more with each conversation and meeting until he realizes that he is, in fact, falling for a man for the first time in his life.

One of the things I really liked here was that there was a lack of ‘gay' panic. In fact, he seems to miss the ‘man' part of the equation all together and panics over the ‘Landon' part of it, instead. The ‘falling for my best friend' (which is a favorite trope of mine) part of it and the ‘falling for the dad of my son's best friend' part of it.

Luke is desperate to be a good dad, despite the dead wife shaped wedge that was driven between them. (I don't usually like the ‘ex's are bitches' that some MLM books get, but with Riley, it worked okay for me. This was partially because it was/is super complicated and because we also deal with Landon'd ex who isn't a bitch.) And 95% of what he does is because/for Emmet.

So, when he realizes he's catching feelings for Landon - for the dad of his son's best friend - he freaks out. He also has a side of not wanting to mess up their friendship because there is no way that Landon could ever like him back. (The self recrimination is strong with this one.)

I don't usually like it when romances are only told from one perspective, but in this book, I'm actually glad we never get Landon's because I liked the slow, incoercible slide into feelings - and I think the first half of the book would have felt vastly different if we all knew that Landon was there already, waiting to catch Luke when Luke falls, as I suspected Landon fell first. (Also, Landon is not an enigma. Landon is very open and honest with Luke right from the start, so we really get to know him as well.)

So, with all of this stuff that I love, I was definitely planning on this book being a 2025 favorite, but then we reached one hundred pages that, honestly, bored me a little. It was just a lot of Luke and Landon making out and having sex and I don't know what it says about me that that is my least favorite part of a romance novel, but, yup, that's my least favorite part of a romance novel. (Pretty much all romance novels...)

Then the last hundred pages pulled it back for me. We had so much good family content, so much father-son content and so much football content. (Which, honestly, I know nothing about football. It makes no logical sense to my brain, but I didn't really feel lost and I might even understand it a little bit now.)

Couple final notes: This book ends the exact way I hate my romance novels to end. But...somehow, I didn't mind it. It works for the book and it didn't upset me the way these type of endings usually do.

This book is a bi-awakening. It is an ‘awakening' not a ‘realization' because Luke never felt this way before. There was no looking into his past and realizing that he repressed his feeling for other men before. Which I super appreciate. (I read a book once that was billed as ‘gay-awakening' and instead it was ‘gay-repression' and that was not what I signed up for.)

However, and your mileage my vary on this, the word ‘bisexual' was used I think once - when Luke was googling. Luke never says he's bisexual. Luke never says he's anything, besides in love with Landon, a man. He doesn't seem to need, want or care about a label. There is no ‘what does this make me?' angst. He's just in love with Landon.

I kind of liked it. I mean, I love the books where the person says ‘I'm bisexual' loudly and often. But Luke's just in love with Landon - and that's really as far as his thought process goes. I think Landon being a man is incidental to Landon being Landon. (Which, now that I write that, Luke might be pansexual.) And I like that for the romance.